There’d also been those six or eight guys who’d hurt themselves—a couple of them badly enough to end up in the hospital with broken bones—and the word was they’d all have to pick up their training in a later platoon. That sucked, in Jack’s expert opinion. Having to come into a platoon full of strangers partway through, knowing no one, no one knowing you…
Jack lived in dread of that happening to him. He knew these guys, was bonded with them, molded with them, become a part of them in a way that he’d never been a part of anything else in his life. After three weeks, Gunnery Sergeant Knox and his assistant DIs had broken everyone about as low as it was possible to break them. Now they were in the process of building them back up.
As something new….
Turning away from the watching recruits, Knox walked ten meters across the open ground of the training field to the two lifelike mannequins standing next to one another, plastic faces showing no emotion. Both dummies wore Marine-issue Class-Three armor breastplates, over OD utilities.
Reaching the dummy on the left, Knox slapped the clay against its breastplate, high up, just below the throat, kneading it with his thumb to make it stick, then inserting a small, black object the size and shape of a domino.
Returning to the recruits, waiting in a semicircle in their soggy, mud-covered utilities, Knox jerked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the waiting dummy. “That, ladies, which I just placed on our volunteer out there, is two hundred grams of C-320 plastic explosives. That’s less than half a pound.” Taking a position next to the table set behind the firing line, he picked up a small controller. “Sergeant Bayerly?”
“Range clear, Gunnery Sergeant Knox!”
Smiling, Knox entered a code into the controller, flipped off a safety, then mashed his thumb down on the firing button without even turning to watch the display.
There was a sharp, ringing crack, and the dummy on the left was kicked backward in a flurry of plastic limbs. Several of the recruits jumped. One said, “Oh, God!”
“God’s not going to help the poor son of a bitch now, recruit,” Knox said, replacing the controller. “Let’s go see.”
Together, the recruits followed Knox across the open field to see the effects of the blast up close. The explosion had punched a hole big enough to admit three fingers straight through the breastplate, through the dummy, and out the rear of the breastplate as well, though the exit hole was smaller than the width of a pencil. Bright red gelatin, the semiliquid stuffing inside the dummy’s chest, was splattered across the ground in a realistic display of human gore.
Jack heard a retching sound from one of his fellow re cruits but couldn’t see who it was. God, if he gets sick seeing a damned dummy get holed!…
“Two hundred grams of high explosives, ladies,” Knox said in his best lecturing tone, “releases one million joules of energy upon detonation. That is enough, as you can see, to penetrate standard Marine-issue armor and blast a very nasty hole clear through your giblets! One megajoule. Remember that! Okay, back to the firing line!”
When the recruits were seated once again, Knox walked over to the table and picked up a long and complex-looking weapon. With its bipod and pistol grip, it had the look of an old-fashioned squad light machine gun, but it was connected to a foil-encased backpack resting on the ground by a segmented cable as thick as a man’s forefinger. Knox hefted the bulky weapon easily with one hand, while he reached down and flipped a switch on the backpack with the other. A tiny, high-pitched whine spooled up from the power pack, and a red light began winking on the weapon’s receiver assembly.
When the red light stopped blinking and glowed steadily, Knox brought the weapon’s stock to his shoulder with a crisp, efficient motion straight out of the Marine Corps manual and squeezed the trigger. There was no flash, no beam, or other outward sign, but downrange, the second target dummy leaped backward with a sharp crack, leaving a faint, hazy blur of vaporized metal hanging in the air. As Knox lowered the weapon, the recruits could hear the power pack spooling up again, until he reached down and switched it off. He replaced the laser weapon on the table, muzzle pointed carefully away from both the students and the range.
“Time to compare,” he told them.
The two dummies lay on their backs, side by side. The second now sported a hole in its breastplate in exactly the same place as the first. The entry hole was a bit smaller…but the exit hole was larger, much larger, with a lot more red goo spattered on the grass.
“One megajoule,” Knox repeated, speaking slowly and patiently, as if for the slowest of students. “One million joules. Watkins! What is one joule?”